[General]

On June 4-5th 2018 the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission is organizing the next edition of the FTA (Future-oriented Technology Analysis) international conference ‘Future in the Making’ to explore how to bridge the future with the present.

Today’s policymaking environment is complex. People seem to lose trust in policymakers and democracy. This is already leading to profound transformation. The number and variety of actors increased. There are new channels of involvement and influence. Policymakers are confronted with an accelerating speed of change. The emergence of novelty requires not only rapid reaction but also creation of new meaning and sense.

In a time when policymaking is going through a paradigm shift, a stronger emphasis is placed on the ability and flexibility of future-oriented methods to respond to new needs. The conference will foster conversations on how to combine forward-looking approaches with elements of complementary disciplines – i.e. design for policy, behavioural insights and science and technology studies – to improve its strategic relevance for policymaking.

The conference aims to contribute to transformation and innovation in policymaking by:

Presenting and debating insights from recent future-oriented work on specific policy relevant topics;

Sharing experiences of how foresight has been used in policymaking

Demonstrating how foresight has influenced policy processes and decisions;

Supporting the advancement of methods, practices and complementary approaches to changing policymaking needs;

Stimulating the uptake of these approaches and exchange between practitioners and policymakers.

Future in the Making is organized to explore how to bridge the future with the present through the opportunity to debate insights from a selection of future-oriented research. Presentations and discussions will be framed around a set of horizontal themes

The Future Center Alliance (FCA – in cooperation with the FCA of Japan (FCAJ), Copenhagen’s Bloxhub, Malmö’s Öresund Future Hub, and SONY Mobile Communications – is organizing the 6thGlobal Future Center Summit this Spring. The Summitwill take place in Copenhagen, Malmö and Lund, on 6-8th May 2018.

The Summit will be like a pop-up prototyping lab, testing new ways of thinking and working, using real world challenges as an agenda, and real world locations as its playing field.

The event will bring together approximately 40-50 people who are directly engaged with future centers, living labs, policy labs and innovation labs of all kinds, in order to exchange ideas and good practice about supporting societal renewal and collaborative innovation in dedicated innovation-enabling work environments. Participants will be facilitated to explore new ways to work together on concrete projects in the coming years.

The theme of this Summit is Bridges: Co-Creating Impact Across Borders.

Each Future Center Summit since 2005 has been a journey, and for the first time this Future Center Summit will be a cross-border journey both geographically and metaphorically.

In this nomadic, three-day prototyping Lab, people will visit and experience several world class Future Centers and Innovation Centers to explore and co-create new ways to drive impact in diverse settings, using insights and learnings from the places they visit, the Future Center operating principles, and the multi-intelligence that participants bring.

People from Future Centers, Living Labs and Design Labs from the Netherlands, England, Sweden, Denmark, France, Turkey, Israel, Japan, Korea and Argentina have already confirmed their participation.

Themes to explore include:

How to leverage diversity, creativity and passion for societal change

How to orchestrate cross border collaboration to deal with boundary-spanning issues

Creative spaces of tomorrow

How to use a visioning process to bring 2050 up close and personal

How to create 3rdgeneration Future Centers which integrate concepts from Future Centers, Innovation Centers and Living Labs

The Camp for Societal Innovation is an instrument for addressing societal challenges in a powerful and effective way. Innovation Camps are a condensed process in which economic, social, technological, cultural and environmental challenges can be addressed at policy, strategy and/or operational levels, and how they can be tackled and ‘solved’ innovatively by key Quadruple Helix stakeholders and experts working together. Since 2010, more than 20 innovation camps have been run using this concept, applying it to support innovation and societal renewal in diverse regions across Europe.

The Camp concept was developed by the New Club of Paris (NCP) and Finland’s Aalto University in 2009. Leif Edvinsson, Markku Markkula, Pirjo Ståhle and Hank Kune co-created the concept and were instrumental in its further development. Valuable comments to improve the methodology have come from Camp conveners, facilitators, challenge owners, participants. In particular, important conceptual and methodological insights have been contributed by members of I2SI (International Initiatives for Societal Innovation), the New Club of Paris, and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission.

There is now a Methodology Handbook that describes key success factors for organizing and running Innovation Camps. This Handbook, bringing together the learnings from eight years of work and 22 camps, is conceived to encourage regions and cities from all over Europe to adopt the Innovation Camps methodology as a tool to collectively and effectively address societal and economic challenges concerning local societies in a larger [European] context through an open, collaborative and inclusive Entrepreneurial Discovery Process (EDP) involving Quadruple Helix actors (i.e. government, industry, academia, and civil society).

The Innovation Camp Methodology Handbook – written by Gabriel Rissola, Hank Kune and Paolo Martinez – is available for downloading on the JRC/Smart Specialisation Platform website: